Comment by bruce511
3 months ago
Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using.
Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will find some other thing yo capture the imagination.
People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was:
> Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
So yes, I may just want to turn the key and have my car work. But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car, so I can better understand what was wrong, and whether I can fix it myself or if I needed a professional.
I run Linux on all my machines, and my family generally uses Mac (both sides), but all those years tinkering with Linux, they still come to me for help with their Mac machines that they insisted would Just Work.
All that out of the way, I agree with your fundamental premise: hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.
I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out. With open source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.
Even this "I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out" is a hard-gained insight. Hackintosh is one of those things that made me understand this. Nothing like spending weeks to get your hackintosh working smoothly with all the hardware just to find out that the next update breaks everything. I've come to see it as a necessary part of the journey
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This is a great point. I sort of detest becoming an expert at proprietary stuff, because I know they'll just change it before long. I've lamented about this elsewhere as modern software creating "permanent amateurs". Even those that want to invest in expertise often find their knowledge outdated in a handful of years, and those that don't want to invest can easily justify it by pointing out this effect.
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Proprietary or not, tinkering help you develop an intuition of what might be wrong.
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This is the reason I still buy older cars. I can't stand owning a car only to find out that I can't work on it myself. Even if I don't have the time or tools needed for a specific job, if its something I could do on my own it means the job should be that much easier and cheaper to have a mechanic do.
I fully empathize - and yet, there are benefits from tinkerers/hackers messing around on proprietary hardware/software. Hackintosh - and similar communties - led to projects like Asahi Linux, Nouveau, Panfrost, etc.
> I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out.
The problem with this approach is then you get a generation of engineers with tunnel vision thinking the One True Way to achieve your goal is the same way your GNU (or whatever) software did it.
Invest time in learning your technologies, whatever they are. There's valuable knowledge in proprietary stuff just as there is in OSS.
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This is a gross misunderstanding of the GP's point though. It's not that they are against doing any of these things. In fact, they said they were more than happy to do it in their youth. I am in full agreement with the GP's sentiment as well.
Mucking about and tinkering with things while one has the time, desire, and stuff to learn is a young "man's" game. I did all of that and absolutely learned a helluva lot. It did everything I needed from it. I got cheaper/better computer than what I could afford. I learned a hell of a lot about not just the hardware pieces I chose, but also why/how certain things about the OS that I never would have.
But now, I too just don't care. It was interesting, but I'm not that interested about maintaining an OS or how it works. I just want it to work. So for all of those that are willing to do all of that today, I'm all for it.
your comment came across to me as just another one of those "if you don't feel the same way i do, you're wrong". that's not true. people can just be in different places in their life. been there, done that does not mean you can't go there and do it too. we're just focused on different things now
There’s another perspective: even if OP is done, if we shut the door (or let it be shut by companies like Apple) then the currently-young won’t be able to tinker and won’t grow to gain the same knowledge.
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I agree that tinkering is a side effect of curiosity, and that curiosity leads to expertise, which has value.
I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's just not interesting.
I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.
The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all along.
In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on to the next challenge.
> Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.
Building a Linux box led me back to Apple.
I had been using UNIX at home, school and work for several years, and decided it was time to build my 3rd Linux box. Went to CompUSA out of idle curiosity to see what equipment they had, and the only computer in the store with Internet access was a Mac.
I hadn't used a Mac since the SE/30 days, and I suddenly realized that the NeXT acquisition which I'd mostly ignored had changed everything. Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software (for, admittedly, significantly more money).
Never looked back.
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I think the awkward part of your first post is that you appear to start with a value judgement that tinkering is for poor people who's time is worthless. That's not remotely fair to either poor people, or rich people who like to tinker. No one's time is worthless. Not your time. Not mine. It's all just time.
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All my PCs and servers run Linux, and its certainly not out of some idealism or anything. I'm fundamentally lazy, but I have a high standard for how things should be. As a result, I tend towards the highest quality, lowest cost (time, money, etc.), and thats Linux for me. Specifically, the setup I run on almost all my machines, which is the most optimal way I have found to write and run software, and play games.
If Windows was easier to use, more stable, less of a hassle, easier to fix, I would use it, but its neither of those (for me). When I have a windows problem, I can either try magical incantations to fix it, reinstall, or give up, and each of those takes much longer than most things I could possibly do on my linux systems. Even if my linux box fails to boot, the drivers break and my ssd doesnt mount, all those fixes together take less time and effort than finding a fix for the most trivial of windows problems.
The most trivial problem on Windows has been that the right click menu doesn't fully populate on first right click. I reported the issue, and thats all I can do. Its been a year and nothing has changed.
On linux, a less trivial problem (a calculator crashing with a series of very weird inputs) was solved by me opening it in gdb and fixing the code, making a PR and having it merged.
I guarantee a lot of people are on linux because its easier, and for no other reason. I dont need it to "just work", because I will break it. I need any possible fix to be possible in bounded time.
Windows has been disconnected from user needs for a very long time. Any logical person would've put a "right click" icon in the Control Panel that would give the user full control of what does and doesn't appear in the menu, their order, etc.
I also use Linux on all my machines but that's because (perhaps after years of tinkering) it is currently the most turn-key laptop/desktop OS. Things just work, they don't break without a good reason, and weird limitations don't randomly pop up.
Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of use designed by Apple in California, are not like that.
Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.
If you sincerely believe this, you've tinkered enough that the massive knowledge barrier that is Linux seems like nothing to you.
I would never sit my 70 year old mother down in front of a Linux machine. We're not at "caring that video files download too slowly" - we're at "how do I put a file on a USB".
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> Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
I have plenty of other things I’d rather tinker with and become an expert on, though. My computer is a tool to let me work with those things. It’s not fun when I have to debug and fix the tool for hours or days before I can even start working on the things I want to work on.
This is me. The range of things I want to tinker with has grown. Various house projects, jiu-jitsu, cooking, etc... are all things I tinker with and learn from. Building computers, I've done and don't feel the need to do again. I even built a Gentoo install long ago when I was learning the nuts and bolts of linux.
Exactly. Why do I want to be neck deep in some XML config hell when I could be playing music?
> Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable" meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent, natively supported hardware.)
That argument doesn’t sound very convincing to me. How would I know an avoiding Ubuntu is reasonable? That still seems to be the go-to distro for many people I know that like to use Linux but aren’t Linux experts. How do I know which hardware is natively supported?
With Windows 10/11 I’ve never had any problems, either with pre-built computers or my home-built PC. Hell, running Ubuntu in WSL has been relatively smooth as well.
My experience with Linux as an OS has been fairly good for many years, regardless of the distro. It’s the applications that could be an issue. Feels like it’s only very recently (post Steam deck in particular) that gaming seems to be viable at all. And it’s hard to beat the MS Office package for work. I recently got the idea to have two user accounts on my home computer where I have an account dedicated to working from home, logged into my office 365 account from work.. and it was honestly amazing how suddenly everything was just perfectly synced between my work and home computer.
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That is patently wrong. I run Fedora on my Framework because it is the most supported and recommended distro for it and I mostly just need a web browser for most of the things I do on it. I've had kernel upgrades break wifi completely, the fingerprint reader doesn't work properly out of the box, 6GHz Wifi isn't supported (though neither is it supported in Windows 10), VLC (which I hate using) is the only media player that supports playing from SMB shares on Linux, Wayland isn't compatible with Synergy type software (and my web browser doesn't work well with xorg), etc.
Most of these things worked without any fuss in Windows and I can't think of any notable Windows issues I had to deal with on the laptop before I installed Fedora.
This is a great linux post because while taking the time to type out distros to avoid is worth it, saying what distros to try is not.
This is 100% false.
I have been running Ubuntu then Arch as my daily driver 2004-2017. As I started a consultant working for Western companies I thought they will care about me being clean copyright wise so I went 100% Linux. This was obviously not so but what did I know? I deeply regret doing this now. (I was dual booting before.)
With Ubuntu, upgrades every six month or so meant you were better off reinstalling and reconfiguring -- no matter which way you went, it was 2-3 days of work lost to tinkering the system. With Arch, the whole system doesn't shatter, it's just this and that doesn't work and it's frustrating. Bluetooth, multifunction scanner-printers being in the forefront. In fact, I needed to sell a perfectly working Samsung MFC at one point because Samsung ceased to make drivers, the old ones didn't work with newer Linux and while open source drivers surfaced that only happened years later. Let's not even talk multimedia. https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.
Neither systems were great on connecting to weird enterprise networks, be it enterprise wifi or strange VPN. At one point I was running an older Firefox as root (!) to be able to connect to the F5 VPN of my client because the only thing supporting 2FA for that VPN was a classic extension -- and the binary helper disappeared in the mists of time. The only Linux related discussion was ... the IT head of my client asking how to connect Linux to his VPN now that he turned 2FA on and being told it doesn't work. https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-ed... well I made it work but faugh.
I have been running Windows 10 + WSL since 2018 January and all is well. It reboots sometimes while I am asleep and that's about it. You need to run O&o shutup like once in a blue moon. Right now I am on Win 11 as my primary laptop is being repaired, you need to run ExplorerPatcher but that's it. It's been indeed six years and there was never an update where the OS just didn't start up or a hardware driver decided to call it quits after an upgrade.
Also, updates are not forced, I control my machine thanksmuch via Group Policy.
https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.
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> avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu
which one you would recommend?
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This is absolutely false. I run dual-boot Windows and Linux on hardware that has 100% Linux support. Windows just works, the same cannot be said for Linux unless all you do is use a browser and listen to Spotify.
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> You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates
Utter fantasy.
They complete whilst I sleep, taking zero of my time at all.
At this point I feel like Linux may be more likely to just work than a windows machine. I just had the unfortunate experience of setting up windows 11, and the number of ‘please wait while we get things ready for you’ was truly astonishing.
It's not. You can go and pick up any computer that is currently on the market, doesn't matter if it's 300 or 3000 dollars as long as it is a (n IBM) PC and it will run Windows.
Will it always be flawless? No. Will it always work perfectly out of the box? No. But it will work and generally you have a good chance of it working as you wish assuming you are fine with Windows and what MS does with it.
I bought an Asus Zephyrus G15 (2022) specifically because it was recommended to me because it is supposed to be great for Linux and it's probably the worst Linux experience I have ever had. As the first piece of hardware that I specifically picked for Linux support.
Because most DEs don't do fractional scaling but all high end laptops have too much DPI to not have fractional scaling.
Nvidia is still not providing proper Linux drivers.
Asus can't program to save their lives but the tools that replace the Asus stuff on Windows are still better than the stuff that is replacing the Asus stuff on Linux (asusctl/ supergfxctl vs G-Helper).
I once had a machine where the nvme drive was simply not working. That was when Kernel 5 came out. It broke on Fedora but worked in Mint until Mint got Kernel 5.
During my last Linux adventure, KDE just died when using WhatsApp as a PWA (where I live, WhatsApp is essential software to have a social life).
And even after years of Wayland being around, it's still impossible to have apps that aren't blurry in most DEs because X11 is still around.
You're complaining about software updates and user friendly loading screens. The issues that drive people away from Linux and to Windows are literally unfixable to 99% of the techies that try Linux. I'm not fixing an nvme driver in the Kernel. That's not my area of expertise. But I still need my machine to work and on Windows, it does.
Rufus let's you create an ISO that skips most of the windows 11 nonsense btw.
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I think that everyone knows that's a pretty ridiculous statement. Installing Windows 11 is basically putting in a USB stick, waiting about 8 minutes, clicking a few things and typing out your login and password. I love Linux, first started playing with it about 20 years ago now. There's not a single dist I've ever seen that is that simple. Just a basic fact, sorry.
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> hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.
Part of this might be that making Hackintoshes is so much harder now, but part of it might also be that OOTB desktop Linux is luxuriously good these days compared to where it used to be. Ubuntu and Pop!_OS linux are absolutely on par with MacOS for a user who meets the (admittedly higher) entry requirements for using Linux.
Your comment makes me think of my 3d printing journey. A lot of printers require maintenance and tinkering just to keep them functional. To an extent, since they are targeted towards “makers” who like to play with these things, that’s fine.
But sometimes the thing you’re trying to build is of central importance, and you want the machine to stay out of your way.Tinkering with the machine takes away time you could be exploring your ideas with a machine that’s already fully functional.
Sometimes the holiday is the destination. Sometimes the fun is in the getting there, not being there.
Tinkering can be fun. But these days I mostly want results, achievements etc. I want to tinker to a successful goal, not just tinker for tinkers sake.
This argument makes a lot of sense. I get more upset than I probably should about car issues, likely because I never spent the time to tinker with them, so I feel rather helpless… and I don’t like feeling helpless.
In my youth I did a lot of tinkering with computers and it has paid dividends. It gave me a career.
These days though, I want to be able to tinker on my own schedule. I want my primary computer, phone, and car to “just work”. That means any low level tinkering needs a second thing. That can work fine for computers, because they’re small and relatively cheap. The idea of having a project car isn’t something I ever see myself doing, as it’s big and expensive.
I can still tinker on some things with my primary computer without it being a problem. Tinkering on writing software, running servers, or whatever, isn’t going to kill my ability to do other things on the computer. A lot of tinkering can be done without tinkering with the OS itself.
To be honest, none of that stuff has been true for 15+ years anyway.
Linux just works now. You put in the Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/whatever USB, you install it, it just works.
I can't remember the last time anything broke on any of my desktop machines and it wasn't my fault for intentionally doing breaky things.
> the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless
You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must still be able to spend it without care, because what would life be otherwise).
> But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car
Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail you. It's too complicated.
Disclaimer: This became more of a rant than I intended. I've become pretty unhappy with the general quality of the "professionals" I've interacted with lately.
I just can't agree with this take. It sounds that simple, but it's not.
I happen to enjoy learning and fixing.
It would take me a long time to build that trust. Nobody cares about my things and my family's safety like I do.
Most people are a long way from making as much money as an expert would charge them.
In the last couple of years, I have had some terrible times when I call for help.
When the dealership is charging $200/hr to have a kid plug in the car and follow a flowchart, I'll just take a look myself.
Plus one time they left my fuel pump loose and I had to pay (in time and money) for an extra round trip with Uber, and the fuel it sprayed onto the road. They didn't fix the original problem, which cost me another round trip.
Another time, I had technicians (experts) out to look at my leaking hot water tank 4 times before they decided it was time to replace it. I wasted the time calling, babysitting, coordinating, figuring out how to shower without hot water, etc.
If this is the average "expert" count me out. I'll do it myself. Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as fun.
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There's levels to tinkering though. When I was running Ubuntu, a lot of the tinkering came down to searching for what config files to update. Sure, that freedom is nice if you care to use it, but it's mostly just searching, configuring, experimenting. This is hardly fun or instructive.
A deeper form of tinkering is actually working on the code. I think an instructive example is writing your own X windowing system with xmonad. You get to see exactly how a whole windowing system works.
These days, if you have the skills and tools to swap a transmission you have to tow it into a dealership and beg them to flash the transmission so it will work in your truck. If you want to avoid that you better know where to find the strategy code and match it up before purchasing another transmission. Same goes for touch screens and a whole slew of essential parts. While we weren't looking the rug was completely pulled out from underneath us. Now your family mechanic is beholden to the dealership.
> People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was:
> > Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
But it is exactly why I quit Linux and returned to macOS. I used to run Linux on cheap 2nd hand ThinkPads and for 3 years on Macbook as main system. But after another upgrade destroyed gain all network connectivity I have quit.
macOS isn't perfect but it works in most imposrtant areas and I can tinker with small stuff when I feel like it.
Ubuntu is so easy to use. I enjoyed using Arch before, but got to a point where I also just wanted my PC to work without any tinkering. Ubuntu is very good at that.
Your argument is excellent and made me evolve my point of view about Mac. I use Mac for efficiency, and yet, I was wrong about what kind of efficiency I’ve been developing. Tinkering is so important, even if just for the fun of it.
Do you not have any hobbies to "waste time" with? I would assume that most Hackintosh enthusiasts do this as a hobby, not for a living or even to save money on hardware.
On my days we used to tinker in proprietary 8 and 16 bit home computer systems, The Way of Linux (TM) is not the only path to enlightment.
Linux is for work. I wouldn’t consider running anything else (Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, etc.) for my services.
Consider FreeBSD, because it’s great.
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You need to understand the bias of many HN commenters. They are running businesses, aspire to run businesses or employed by businesses that are monetizing the work of tinkerers and packaging it for a mass market where they can sell higher volumes or mine more personal data. There are a lot of people who will recommend spending massive amounts of time and money learning and renting proprietary services over learning fundamental concepts and owning your own stack. I just ignore them along with the crypto bros before them and the AI pumpers now. Renting proprietary closed services to people who don't know better is their bread and butter.
I really like the way you put that.
That was a beautiful analogy.
a frustrating freely accessible experience being priceless is not mutually exclusive from your time being worthless
but I’m sure your point will inspire someone
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For you, me, other people on HN who generally make a living by understanding computers, definitely.
For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No.
> For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No.
when it was needed to do it last time, in way more troublesome than Windows system updates?
Even as a dev with 3 environment I've not had to tinker my kernel since I left gentoo something like 15 years ago, Ubuntu takes care of it..
>Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
Yeah, but an expert in what? There are only so many hours in a day. Like if you care about learning about some rando soy d driver, or why all you photos come out pink under Linux, but not Windows[], that’s great. Go knock yourself out.
But if you want to do something that’s not rando debugging, then maybe it’s not for you. Like, I like Unix. It’s lets me do my work with the least amount of effort. What I don’t like is being a sysadmin. Some folks do, and that’s awesome. But that’s the reason why I got rid of desktop Linux 20 years ago.
[] Both of these are actual lived experiences. I do not care about you chiming in about either of these.
I don't know about you, but for me it was never about the money. I did this stuff (and still do) because I find it fun, not because I can't afford to buy it. I have my desktop, and I want that to just work, and I have a bunch of computers, hardware, 3D printers, etc etc that I constantly tinker with, because I like it.
I suspect it's the same for you, and it may be the lack of time, but not so much the access to money.
As a teen in the mid-oughties. I played heavily with the OSx86 project/Hackintosh. I learnt about writing kexts and kernel patche and I fondly remember getting a Linksys USB-to-ethernet adapter working on an HP workstation, running Tiger.
My financial circumstances have improved somewhat in the intervening years. Today, I own quite a bit of Apple hardware, most recently Vision purchase overton-shifted my definition of “disposable” into very unfamiliar territory. Even still, about once a year I ensure I can still triple-boot” - just now I do it with ProxMox and Virtual Passthrough. The first iMessage sent from my virtualized “iMac pro” at 2AM and was almost as gratifying as the first Apple Bootscreen on a a Sony Vaio.
May we never lose whatever that is.
Spot on for me, but there's a different argument at play: At the beginning of the OSX on x86 times, Apple had an OS with a stellar user experience, but the hardware was just completely overpriced, so Hackintosh made complete sense.
Fast forward to today and I think Apple managed to pivot this almost to the complete opposite end. I think the hardware is incredible value (that's debatable for sure, but my M1 aluminum machined Macbook with Apple Silicon is blazing fast, completely silent, super sturdy and runs forever — I wouldn't trade it for any other laptop I could buy with money), while the Operating System has really taken a backseat, with hugely annoying bugs unfixed since 10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460
To me, in a world like that, Hackintosh simply doesn't make much sense anymore. Asahi Linux is really the star on the horizon, by doing exactly the opposite: Letting a free and better maintained operating systems run on strictly awesome hardware.
Value was the driving factor for some of my early hackintoshing (Core 2 Duo era), but what pushed me to do it from 2015-2020 was the abysmal state of higher powered Mac hardware.
The Mac Pro was still the un-updated 2012 trash can, the 15” MBPs were too thin for the CPUs they housed (perhaps Intel’s fault for getting stuck on 14nm for so long, but still) and were hot with terrible battery life, and while the 27” iMacs weren’t terrible and probably the best of the lineup, they still weren’t cooled quite as well as they should’ve been. My 6700k + 980Ti tower in a Fractal Define case with a big quiet Noctua cooler was just flat better and made a far better Mac than anything Apple sold at the time.
That said, I did eventually grow tired of the tinkery-ness of it all and in 2020 picked up a refurbed base model iMac Pro, one of the few Macs in that timespan that wasn’t a mistake, for about half its MSRP. It was about as powerful as that tower, surprisingly even more quiet, and of course just worked without the tinkering.
This is the classic "money is time, time is money" conundrum. A teenager doesn't have the money to buy a fancy car or computer but they have the time to tweak and experiment to get the most out of it. Meanwhile an adult has the money but not the time, assuming they have a full time job, kids, etc. So they're willing to spend the money to get products that work and would rather spend their limited time with their family instead.
In my teens I had a group of friends who loved to tinker, from hackintoshes to custom ROMs to homelabbing to electronics repair. Now I'm like the only one left who does this stuff :(
When you're young you have all the time, all the energy, but none of the money.
When you're an adult you have all the energy, all the money, but none of the time.
When you're a retiree you have all of the money, all of the time, but none of the energy.
A generalisation of course, but quite apt!
The only way out of this is an early retirement in a LCOL area or a job with a very good WLB (which is likely pretty rare for most HNers in the tech industry). Even ignoring overtime I'm typically tired when I get home from work and have other commitments alongside my hobbies and tinkering.
Techinically when you're retired you don't have all of the time. For most people they only have 1/5 or less or their time left.
> Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
This resonates with me as well. As a teenager with my first car I spent a lot of time tweaking its appearance, sound, performance, etc., buying what little I could from local auto parts stores. I couldn't wait to get older to have more money so I could do more mods and really make the vehicle how I wanted it.
In the back of my head I wondered why older folks didn't do this though. They have these nice vehicles but they're bone stock! Why not new wheels, tint, a tasteful lower, etc.?
Then I myself got older and found it just isn't as important as it used to be. I still have a slightly modified car, but I'm not rooting around inside the dash with a soldering iron like I once did, haha.
Haha that is a very similar mindset I had when I bought my first house. I was excited about all of the nice improvements I could make and wondered why so many people I knew who were well off never really put much work into their home.
Then I quickly realized that its such a big hassle and also you almost instantly get used to things how they are.
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I don't understand. Do you imagine there isn't a young generation of time rich cash poor tinkerers now? Why would the idea of a hackintosh suddenly become obsolete because you can afford one now and don't have time? Nothing about your statement logically follows.
He’s just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and talking about themselves. I’ve seen the “I used to tinker but now I don’t” line a hundred times as well as the “this doesn’t apply to me so I don’t care - let me tell you how”.
Isn't that the truth. For a site with the word "hacker" in it there seem to be so few of them. I can't imagine letting all that curiosity die out of me like the parent comment implies.
I don't have the amount of time I used to to do that stuff either but the curiosity of it has never died and if I had more time I'd still do it.
If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.
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In what sense is this an "HNism"?
Ever since blogs have had comments sections, the set of people who are too lazy to make their own blogs, have been holding forth (writing, essentially, their own blog posts) in other people's blogs' comment sections.
Heck, I'm sure people were doing it on Usenet and all-subscribers-can-post mailing lists, too — using the "Reply" button on a message to mean "I want to create a new top-level discussion that quotes/references this existing discussion" rather than "I want to post something that the people already participating in this existing discussion will understand as contributing to that discussion."
In all these cases, the person doing this thinks that a comment/reply is better than a new top-level post, because the statement they're making requires context, and that context is only provided by reading the posts the statement is replying to / commenting on.
Of course, this being the internet, there is a thing called a hyperlink that could be used to add context just as well... but what there is not, is any kind of established etiquette that encourages people to do that. (Remember at some point in elementary school, learning the etiquette around writing a letter? Why don't schools teach the equivalent for writing a blog post/comment? It'd be far more relevant these days...)
Also, for some reason, social networks all have "reply" / "quote" actions (intended for engaging with the post/comment, and so showing up as "reactions" to the post/comment, or with your reply nested under the post/comment, etc); but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) Instead, you always have to manually dig out the URL of the thing you want to cite, and manually cite it in your new post. I wonder why...
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On the contrary, I was relating the article to my own experience. The thrust of the article was explaining the end of an age.
I was merely saying that we shouldn't see this as bad, it is the natural way of things. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Raise a glass to remember hackintosh, but don't mourn it.
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They’re not that far off topic - the site would be far less interesting if we didn’t have tangential discussions in the comments.
They are also, as you noted, expressing a very common opinion.
Now I’m off to spend my Saturday not tinkering, because there’s a bigger world out there and I’ve done my time.
HN community selects for these kinds of posts, in the same way that subreddits like /r/amitheasshole love overwrought girlfriend-is-evil stories.
Most often the highest rated posts on HN are from 40+ year olds who don't discuss the post at hand, they'll post a hyper-specific nostalgic story from their youth on something that is tangentially related to the post.
In fact, the older the better. If your childhood anecdote is from the 70s or 80s you're a god.
There are other things that are more interesting to build and make now than a hackintosh (with the added difficulty that trying to make a silicon compatible device may not be feasible).
Combine this with that a Mac mini that might be at the target for a hackintosh device is $600 USD ... and has the advantage that it isn't hacked together and so has better support.
The part of me that wanted to tinker with a hackintosh in my younger days is more satisfied by Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. I've even got an Onion IO over there that could use some love.
Its not that people don't want to tinker, but rather the utility that one gets for hacking together a Mac (again, note the silicon transition) is less than one gets for hacking on single board computers.
As I said in my post, the next generation will find something new to tinker on.
The idea of a hackintosh is obsolete because there are new worlds to conquer, the time of hackintoshes has come and gone. The new generation will find their own challenges, not re-hash challenges of the past.
I guess the commercial success of the platform has increased the offering in the second hand market.
Also, the MacOs desktop has pretty much stagnated and is behind the competition. What is strong is the seamless integration of the whole Apple ecosystem so it makes sense to run MacOs if you already own iOS devices. I doubt people using iphones and ipads are struggling to finance the purchase of a mac.
It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".
The primary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who, like the GP in their youth, couldn't afford to just buy "hardware with full compatibility", let alone buy the equivalent-specced Mac.
The secondary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as possible.
People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added tinkering — they can, if you do this, but ~nobody does this.)
I have a need to be able to run macos binaries and xcode from time to time, and it used to be non-trivial to run macos in a unsanctioned vm so I had a mac laptop around.
But these days you can spin up a qemu macos vm without too much effort and that's my virtual hackintosh.
I remember I needed Hackintosh to build an iPhone app on my PC. You must possess a Mac to make apps for iPhones, don't know why.
This really brings me back. My first hackintosh as a kid was on a 1.4ghz Pentium 4 with a ATI Radeon 9600.
I started my developer career on Hackintoshes many years ago.
No matter how much time I invested into building my desktop, it never "just worked". There were always inevitable problems with software updates, which often meant you had to re-image the system from scratch to install a new OS version. Which happened quite often, when you needed it to run the latest Xcode.
Then there were a lot of minor annoyances over the years, like crashes and graphical glitches with certain apps, like Photos or Preview, problems with monitor resolutions and refresh rates, and many, many others.
Ultimately, they were a useful tool for a time, but they suffered from death by a thousand cuts in terms of practical usability. So, I bought a basic Mac Mini as soon as I was able to, and never looked back.
The first hackintosh I built back around 2008 I was able to get working actually perfectly. Somehow the hardware and software bits all aligned and everything worked great. It’d run for months on end without issue.
Nothing since that one were quite as good. Had a Dell laptop for a while that was almost perfect, but would lock up and require a reboot once every couple of weeks. A tower I built in 2016 was also almost perfect, except I never could get USB working 100% right and later on the Nvidia drivers got flaky.
I built a hackontosh in 2016, bought all the right mobo with the right driver sets, etc. Used the buyer's guides on tonymacx86.com and purchased the exact hardware, downloaded the drivers, flashed things, etc. It was far from "just working". I had a stable and solid system for about 18 months (after a weekend of tweaking), and then it needed to be reconfigured, and I didn't have the time to spend the weekend getting it to work again....so that machine went back to windows. Even with the proper supported Nvidia card, I had issues, and went through some pains with the wifi.
Cost of ownership of an M3 MacBook Pro is like $300-400 a year. Even if you have the time, it's just not worth it anymore like it used to be.
I wouldn't count on 10 years of real-world life from a non-upgradeable and 'repair-resistant' device with a glued in battery, even if the hardware specs are good enough to last that long.
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It seems reasonable when you consider TCO, but you still have to pay 100% up front. Not everyone can drop $2k on a laptop, most people don’t need to.
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I assume people would do this to get a powerful machine and not comparable with one of the cheaper Macbooks?
Did you factor in repair costs?
A 14in MBP with an M3 Pro/36GB/1TB is $2800. Add 10% sales tax, and that's about 3k.
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> It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".
Oh JFC. This canard has been floating around the about linux for 30 years, and it's always been a half truth at best.
Inevitably, it always comes down to "Cards with 2361YSE rev 5 chipset" or some other nonsense. Like that makes total sense for a kernel developer, but most people don't know what chipset they have in some peripheral.
So now you're left with assholes saying, "WeLL yOu ShOuLd gEt InFoRmEd. JuSt GoOgLe iT!", and it ain't that easy. If you can even find a brand name to chipset list, it's going to be out of date, or it's going to be something that says "2361Y" or "2361YSE rev 3" or something. Is that close enough to "2361YSE rev 5"? Who knows!
Then the best part? Even when you lookup the hardware with "full compatibility", you'll find that it actually isn't. Then when you ask about it, you'll get, "I just don't use that feature, and you shouldn't use it either."
You guys that grow old forget that there's still younger people in this *world* (not just the US). It's analogous to saying "I worked 9to5 in the 2000s (when wages were acceptable). But now that I have way less energy to work, and made millions off my retirement fund. I don't see why this generation shouldn't equally work as hard today."
Tinkering shouldn't be nostalgia, it should be a right. I'm sure you used to fix the rusty old generational family car with your dad on the weekends. He probably used to do the same with your grandfather on the weekends. I don't think there'll be a car to fix for the next generation.
Just like ramen or office chairs can measure a recession, fixing cars with a father figure could be used as an indicator for the prevalence of greed in society.
I was also that kid. I remember an OSX upgrade breaking my mouse and I couldn't figure out how to get it working again. I was desperate for a Mac, but it was financially unattainable.
I feel the same way with phones. I pre-ordered a Nexus One the day it opened, installed a dozen custom ROMs, etc etc. Upgraded to a Nexus 4, 5. These days I use an iPhone. Don’t miss it, though I’m nostalgic for the excess free time!
Same for me. I spent countless hours recompiling my kernel in slackware, configuring enlightenment window manager. These days I don't even change the desktop wallpaper.
Yeah I spent literally dozens of hours of my life compiling different kernels with OSS and ALSA variations to get my sound card working lol. Really a 'you had to be there' thing.
I have one running in a virtual machine but on hardware that would natively support a Hackitosh which I use only for testing Mac distributions. It's too old to use now but when I built it you could buy Mac OS at Best Buy.
While tinkering for the sake of tinkering is as good of a hobby as any other, the process of tailoring your OS's does not have to be infinite. Maybe it is different for others, but while I did spent a lot of time on writing my Linux dotfiles until they were nearly perfect, for the last 5 years or so, when I have a fresh OS install, it's really just 'git clone; chezmoi apply' and I get a system where every keybind is exactly where it needs to be.
When work banned Linux machines and I had to transition to OS X, I had to do just as much, if not more, tinkering to make it work for me. Perhaps it does 'just works' for those who think exactly like Steve Jobs - but if you want it your way and on your terms, there'd be a lot of tinkering to do, from yabai configs to Karabiner json configs and custom plists, to replacing most of the gelded Apple apps.
I had a similar revelation a few years ago. My giant PC gaming rig blew up again (specifically my 3080 shit itself), a year after having to replace the power supply and requiring the whole thing.
I was just done with faffing around with that kind of thing.
So I bought a (then fairly recently released) Mac Studio, just the plain jane base 32GB model, and couldn’t be happier. So nice to have something virtually silent and energy efficient, instead of jet turbine that drew about 300w at idle.
I 100% do not want a laptop for my primary personal machine, but the big workstation towers are too much.
The Studio is that wonderful Goldilocks zone - performant, bring-your-own input devices, but merely “a bit pricey” and not extravagantly so.
Same story but with custom Android ROMs
Agree. I used tweaked BlackBerry ROMs for a couple years before getting my first Android device, an HTC One M7 with Android 4.4 KitKat. Spent loads of time getting all the tools working to modify ROMs, bootloaders, recovery/TWRP, and squeeze every drop of performance out of that phone. Then went "backwards" to an iPhone 4S and have been rocking stock iPhones ever since.
those were the days. Nowadays it alls feels same-ish and boring. Can't wait for a new kind of device where not everything has been figured out yet.
The Steam Deck sort of occupies this space today. I'm not in the scene myself but I've read about users modding them, running unsupported OSs, liquid cooling them, etc. Seems like any sufficiently broad technology will garner a community of hackers and modders around it.
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I played with jolla/sailfish for a while and the device was awesome but I couldn't get myself to like gesture/swipe navigation (I hate it on the current flock of iOS/Android with same passion)...
For the device I'm pondering new OP which is more open than the rest but still, as you said - it's mostly the same OS and the changes are not that significant to spend all that time on flashing...
Yea but thats how you learn.
These ipad kids dont know anything because it all works now for games and netflix. No need for drivers, windows installs etc
Macs are very expensive in some parts of the world, where other computer brands are affordable. A hackintosh could be a good option, and when somebody learns to do it well they could do it for others for money. Not only installing MacOS on PCs, but also installing newer versions of MacOS on Macs that are officially not supported anymore.
> A hackintosh could be a good option, and when somebody learns to do it well they could do it for others for money
Apple thoroughly screwed over Mac developers that the only compelling software that's exclusive to MacOS is developed by Apple themselves[1], IMO. Even those packages have equivalent (or better) alternatives on Windows. Macs used to be the platform for DTP, audio and video production - now all the 3rd party developers have pivoted away to other operating systems. One of the reasons professionals resorted to Hackintoshes in the past was because Apple had periods of neglecting the Mac Pro hardware on and off. Why would anyone go through the paid of setting up a Hackintosh in 2024, outside of being a fan of MacOS aesthetics?
1. Logic Pro likely has the biggest pull; Final Cut isn't the halo app it once was.
I use many third-party apps on MacOS that are top of the line in their niche, regardless of OS. People have many different uses for computers and workflows that you are unfamiliar with.
When you discover how programs on MacOS can connect and interact with each other and with the OS as a whole, it becomes a completely different experience.
Macs continue to absolutely dominate audio and video production, and desktop publishing. You're just making stuff up.
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I couldn't agree more. I started my life buying/using Macs but nowadays I wonder why people make the financial effort considering the very large premium even though Macs don't do anything much better anymore.
You are right that the main driver is probably Logic. Final Cut is being largely replaced by BlackMagic and Adobe softwares (because they work everywhere and integrate better with other things people care about). Avid software works just as well on PC. As for the desktop publishing stuff, this is a use case so trivial (and in some ways displayed by web tools) and so dominated by Adobe that it feels Adobe is really doing Apple a favor in keeping their software update/optimized on time.
In my opinion/experience, they keep selling them because it is very hard for people to change. Most keep using them because this is what they are used to and similar reasons.
This is where Apple is very shortsighted and acting pretty stupid, you can see the young largely ignoring Apple computers because they are way too expensive, I believe they have permanently eroded their domination even in the media industries, because even though they have the money it won't take long to notice they can keep doing the same quality work even if they buy hardware half as expensive because it makes no difference to their young workers.
Apple premium pricing was a historical artifact of always being on the bleeding edge and being one step ahead of the competition for many things. Now, aside of the silicon (that has some advantage for the laptop in the form of battery life, but not really any for the desktop) it doesn't feel like they are ahead for anything.
In fact, when you take a hard look, you realize they are selling update of stuff that were designed 10 to 15 years ago and not much has changed when the PC industry as a whole has evolved quite a lot.
What is strong though, is the delusions of people defending their extortionate price for whatever ridiculous reason they can think of at the moment.
Don't get me wrong, I think Macs are ok for the most part, just not at their current price, especially in Europe (France).
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With a little preparation setting up a Hackintosh is not much more difficult than setting up an actual Mac. What you're describing is a myth or just out of date.
It really depends if you're tinkering because you have no choice versus tinkering because you like it. People will absolutely tinker on cars for their entire life, but upgrade to more interesting jobs like doing engine swaps rather than just changing their oil.
But it sounds like you were tinkering because you had no other choice, not because you enjoyed it.
To me it was having just one powerful upgradable desktop computer with Windows and MacOS. So I don't have to have devices on my desk.
Now I have solved with PC desktop, MacBook Air, and Apple Display. PC also has usb-c display output so I can just switch which cable connects to the display.
Downside is still that M1 is not as fast, especially something that is GPU intensive as the PC I have.
> this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using.
You know you’re alive when you log into iCloud from a hackintosh and then Apple notices, you get the ‘unauthorised hardware’ message (I can’t remember the exact phrasing) and your various iCloud services begin to cease functioning. It’s not often your OS is exciting.
I had the same experience with windows 98/2k and my franken pc of randomly upgraded parts. I used to have to reinstall win98 every other month or so because it was so unstable. I had the installer on a separate partition, so I could just wipe the system disk and have a clean install up in 12 minutes.
> These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work
Me too. But it seems i'm out of luck. Everyday i have to fix something. Today "quality" means how much user data we steal, not if a system works.
I find these days the Steak Deck has become a great device for tinkering. I've seen people do some nice unexpected stuff with it, for example making an opening in the back to connect an dedicated GPU or using it to pilot drones in Ukraine.
*I meant "Steam Deck", autocorrect strikes again...
There are new generations of cash poor tinkerers though, including the 3rd world.
from around 2008 to 2012 I ran hackintosh, on desktop, it was great and fun in 2012 I bought a first MacBook. The good experience on the hackintosh made me get the MacBook. So I like to think hackintosh helped apple.
> These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
I have said this same thing about Android vs iPhone. Also, if I cannot tinker with Android then I might as well have an iPhone.
I agree your first three paragraphs, but why won’t they want to continue to hack?
It was my obsession with worthless endeavors that got me the kind of job that made my time valuable in the first place
> 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
See, that 35 years for me didn't make me stop working on my cars, it just allowed me to have enough money to have a reliable car as well as "toy" cars that I can still tinker with. I drive the Audi, but I still wrench on the Triumph. I used to tinker with Hackintosh stuff as well, and I haven't stopped tinkering, just moved on to other things, like this Rubidium frequency source I just bought to build a high accuracy NTP server from a Raspberry Pi. (Yes, of course, there are already cheap and easy solutions for this, but I want to tinker).
Either OP doesn't consider tinkering an enjoyable past-time activity or they've no free time to do something they enjoy. Both quite sad to be honest.
I wouldn’t go as far as “sad”. Free time is always a finite resource you have to prioritise. I used to tinker, these days I’d much rather spend time with my kids. I’m definitely not sad about it. I’ll have plenty of time for tinkering in the future.
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Can people simply have priorities?
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>These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
This but with LLMs lol.
Same here with Emacs. Tinkering-vs-doing. Opportunity costs too high.
There was a time when hackintosh was practical for everyone who needs macOS and/or can't stand other desktop OSes. It was the tail end of Apple's Intel hardware. It was pathetic in terms of performance (underpowered CPUs and buggy GPU drivers), quality (butterfly keyboards) and thermal design (things would overheat all the time), yet expensive.
I myself was contemplating building a ridiculously overpowered hackintosh machine around 2019. Then the ARM transition was announced. And then the M1 came out with overwhelmingly good reviews from literally everyone. So I decided to wait for the beefed up "professional" version, which did come later, so here I am, typing this on an M1 Max MBP, the best computer I've owned so far.
Also, for me personally, hackintosh was an introduction to macOS. I was a poor student at the time and couldn't afford a real Mac. Of course I bought one about as soon as I could.
went from hackingtosh to mac, never had enough to afford a car. (I think)
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